Masks
by Thereon15
Summary: A year after Overwatch has fallen, Tracer finds herself alone and running out of options as she's locked in a battle with Talon, slowly freezing and trying to put her past to rest...


Her feet took off, slamming into the ground.

The last pulse bomb would not buy her more than a few seconds, and even then she might not escape with her life...

She checked behind her, pausing just long enough to see an assault rifle aimed at her forehead. Clearly, the masked figure standing mere feet from death itself hoped to get off one final shot before he melted into fire. The agent looked down his sights, heedless to the sleek, blinking bomb near his feet.

Fired a bullet that whizzed by Lena's head, so close it frayed the strap of her goggles and burnt her skin near her temple. She cried out with pain, this injury to be added to a long list of similar ones sustained during the fight.

Yet she was still alive. Out of blinks, out of recall, out of options.

But alive.

Because the last shot the Talon agent behind her would ever ever take was a miss.

A blinding flash, accompanied by the all too familiar BOOOOOM of the explosive going off. Lena had, by some miracle, distanced herself sufficiently, but still felt the shock as it threw her forward, aiding her surging momentum and almost toppling her to the ground.

But she managed to catch herself. This was no place to fall, to freeze to death, to be taken by her worst enemy...

Snow. Flurries of muddied ice kicked up at her leather jacket and face as she ran like hell, oblivious to the howling winds and the bitter frigidness of her surroundings. She checked the readings displayed in her visor; 700 meters to the extraction point.

Great. It was too far. Too many enemies would surely intercept her before she reached salvation...

She had to have another option. She had to. Because if not... _NO_. She just needed to _think..._

A rope lay on the ground, near a red Talon vehicle. She recognized it as the personnel truck abandoned some time ago after she had juked it into a wreck; blinking away just in time, the Talon driver too focused on hitting her to notice the tremendous snowbank just ahead-

The rope was rapidly uncoiling as something far up ahead pulled it along, up over the bank. There was still a good amount of it left to grab, if she could just reach it-

With a grunt of determination, Lena threw her body towards her target, practically falling onto the rope as it rapidly ran out underneath her. She managed to close her frostbitten fingers over the last few inches before she felt the wind get knocked out of her gasping lungs, and suddenly she was no longer moving of her own volition-

Fast.

That was the first thing she noticed about the rope. It went fast, so much faster than she had expected. She could swear she got whiplash as it jerked her forward with the force of a jet, willing her over the snowbank and slamming her across the icy ground. Bits of ice and falling snow now jabbed at the areas of exposed skin, where her suit had been torn away, and her lungs struggled to breath anything other than the painfully-frigid air whipping across her hair.

Her goggles were being swamped with a blizzard of frosted pellets, her stomach was burning from a graze from an earlier scuffle in the snow, and her hands were threatening to either let go of the rope or freeze themselves against its rough material.

But that was not what bothered her the most.

It was that she could hear the voices.

And the unmistakable rumble of a Talon DX-ORION1 Tank.

Of all the things she could have gotten tethered to, it was a goddamn tank that took the cake.

Up ahead, not thirty feet from her location, a masked agent, goggles red as blood, was reeling the rope in, speaking to someone on his comm.

He seemed confused, probably since he had not yet seen Lena and was wondering why the hell the rope was so heavy-

The next second his visor exploded in a vortex of blood, bones, and metal. Lena prided herself in a few things, one of them being her ability to aim in the most high-pressure, difficult situations.

Her hand still stung from gripping the rope too tightly, but was just functional enough to press the trigger on her nearly-spent pulse pistol as she emptied the clip and laid waste to the agent. His body fell slack as his hands left the rope, and Lena felt an involuntary sick pang as he fell across the side of the tank's back platform and off into the snow.

Gone, just like the others she had killed. Never to be seen again. Never to be remembered.

But were they really the nameless, faceless, single-minded, morally-corrupt goons she had been told they were practically since her first day as an Overwatch agent, long before the organization had dissolved?

Or were they something more, behind their rigid postures, smooth formations, and identical masks?

Desperate fathers needing income? Sons with nothing to love and nothing that loves them left in the world? Frightened men blackmailed into submission, or even brainwashed?

Orphans? Writers? Scientists? She knew it was naive, soft thinking, but it was just her nature to deviate to those thoughts whenever the angry hiss of her pistols cut yet another human's life short...

The possibilities were there that those countless souls she had killed were more than two-dimensional evil cutouts, however unlikely that it seemed at the time, when the red-eyed masks looked into her face without a semblance of emotion or humanity and raised their weapons without hesitation. But she nevertheless knew that the possibilities were there. These were human soldiers who had trained for years, lived through pain and pleasure, meant everything to someone out there, once or still-

And she had killed them all, with a finger on a light little pistol, a finger that had caressed the hairs of little girls during Overwatch's prime in an effort to inspire them, a finger that now was too cold to do anything more than move the trigger the single centimeter that was needed to end someone's life and send them tumbling down over the railing of a Talon DX-ORION1 tank as the wind blew, blood painting the white ground and brain matter falling like snowflakes...

Because, she swore, if she hadn't, he would have killed her.

They would all have killed her without a second thought.

To fight killers, you had to become one. Monsters only ran from their own.

Even back then, when all Morrison knew to preach about was world peace and unity, when Overwatch seemed invincible and she had lived the life of a celebrity - she knew that war was always the inevitable option when things started to go wrong. Humanity was bollocks at repairing problems before they got out of hand. Ignoring, even encouraging the wounds that lay deep under the surface, allowing selfish desires and petty grudges stand between compromise and amends.

It was what brought it all down to hell to begin with. It was what had ended them, and what had ended countless other regimes and societies and organizations. And she _knew_ none of it was ever going to get better, no matter how she'd pretended otherwise to the press and to the people back then, and to Emily now.

Knew it as she struggled to fall asleep, trying to keep the images of exploding red goggles and free-flowing blood from black uniforms out of her mind, knew it when she smiled to the flashing cameras and the gaggles of fans and assured them all was hopeful and the world was fine, knew it when she found herself explaining to government officials or crowds of critics why Overwatch was under investigation yet again, reciting her poster-perfect lines and rehearsed speeches, longing that she could cut that bullshit and say that all of them could never understand how damaged, how broken, the world had really become, with even the almighty Overwatch sinking under the turbulent seas as a masked kraken with gleaming shotguns tore it apart.

She remembers screaming inside her head at the time:

 _IT ISN'T ALL RIGHT. RUN. TAKE YOUR CHILDREN AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF LONDON, BEFORE-_

But she couldn't speak up. She didn't. And just like that, it was too late.

And then there were the bodies. Her bodies.

Morrison had no problem with killing. She remembers when she was a young field agent, before King's Row, walking to his office to confront him with a very well-rehearsed argument about sparing their enemies or engaging them non-lethally, but all Jack said was-

 _Our enemies? They're selfish. Cruel. Whether they be man, woman, or bot, they have nothing to live for other than chaos and destruction. Only rush they get is from bombing subways, from shooting up cities. Harming of millions of good, innocent people. If these bastards had a second chance, or a third, they didn't take it. Now, they got us to deal with, and, as usual, we're bringin' them to the gates. No questions asked, no hesitations. We can't get sappy or they'd eat us alive. Heaven or hell, let whatever god they believe in be the judge. I'm just the escort, sending them on their way. And Overwatch is just the cab that takes 'em._

Jack knew that if the roles were reversed, the ones he had put down would have killed him, or worse. So he simply shrugged off the injuries, both to his body and conscience, with a few shots of Captain Amari's rifle, a Biotic Field, and a rifle slung across the shoulder.

Tracer learned to respect him, and to be like that, too.

Until she learned that her best friend had been found in a pitiful alleyway in King's Row, shot with sixteen rounds of an OR14's fusion cannon.

 _Null Sector would pay. For the death, for the damage to our entire city, our culture-_

That time, Jack had listened.

And it was with the thought of what they, what _she_ -had done that day, on that mission, that kept her hands on the rope, kept her teeth ground tight with determination instead of chattering with the cold, and kept her moving forward, towards the formidable tank that towed her onward still.

The world may burn, Overwatch may fall, but she knew one person would not give up.

And that person was going to single-handedly take down an BX-ORION1.

* * *

Guys! Just played OW again after like a year and a half lol.

So many fun, fun new characters!

Don't worry, as the entire cast will make an appearance sooner or later.

Anyway, I'm taking a break from my usual story-writing to soothe my mind with some fanfic.

Please read, and tell me what you think in those comments! At some point I will be accepting OC suggestions from commenters. I will let you know when.

(I started the story out with Tracer because, frankly, I need to educate myself on all the cultures/languages of the heroes besides English-speaking ones before attempting to incorporate them as accurately as possible. (Yes, this includes the south, where McCree is from, which is basically a foreign world to me lol).

Thanks! Next chapter coming soon!

Thereon15


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